1. Introduction
[1.1] In 2006, one fan, Hope (http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Hope), formed a Web site called the "Super-Canon," in which she aimed to single-handedly provide a resource for fans of the television show Supernatural, including documentation of tie-in material and canon minutiae. Shortly thereafter, she and another fan, Lea, converted it into a wiki format. Thus the Super-wiki (http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/) was born. Now run by a team of four administrators, the Super-wiki is a rich resource documenting both Supernatural and its fandom.
[1.2] Some statistics will indicate the growing size and popularity of the site. The Super-wiki currently has 1,211 entries and 2,218 editors registered. In the year from October 2008 to October 2009, the wiki had over 1.13 million hits, from over 500,000 unique visitors. They came from 196 countries, with the top six being the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Brazil. The Super-wiki is growing in popularity, and October 2009 saw 127,855 hits from 67,182 visitors—an increase of more than 50% for the same month in 2008.
[1.3] The interviewees are Hope, Leandra, Jules (aka Missyjack), and Vanae. Also vital to the wiki, though not interviewed, is Esther.
[1.4] This interview was conducted in fall of 2009 via e-mail, and the text was then edited for brevity and clarity. Deborah Kaplan (http://suberic.net/~deborah.kaplan/), the interviewer, is a former Fanlore software administrator and the current software and content administrator of the Diana Wynne Jones wiki (http://suberic.net/cgi-bin/dwj/wiki.cgi). This interview explores the challenges unique to crowd-sourced information gathering and the multiauthorship mode of the wiki.
2. Multiple contributors, crowd sourcing, and shared work
[2.1] DK: Wikis have to contend with a multitude of viewpoints that often conflict with one another. How did you choose what was appropriate for the Supernatural wiki?
[2.2] Lea: The wiki originated from Hope's site "Super-Canon," which in 2006 aimed to provide as much information on Supernatural as possible. At that time, Hope did all the work by herself. I became involved through some meta I wrote on my journal and which she wanted to include on the site. We came to talk about archiving not only facts, but also meta. The problem was that we felt that one or two people couldn't do all the work, and then suddenly a thought popped up like the proverbial lightbulb: "What if anyone could add information to the site?"—and the wiki was born. To me, that's the Super-wiki's central idea: The fans themselves can add and alter information. That way, we have a broad range of information, which also includes the documentation of fandom projects (in that, we differ from most other TV-series wikis). Of course, if more people work together on one topic, there are bound to be controversy and different points of view. That's why we aim to provide as many sources as possible for the material we add. We do a lot of fact checking, too. Some parts of the entries on the wiki are protected—for example, when there are direct quotes involved. Whenever possible, we cite sources and urge the users to do so as well. In case of controversy, we try to resolve the problem by involving the users as well. We strive for a neutral point of view, but in case of controversy, we try to be as objective as possible and also feature multiple points of view.
[2.3] Hope: The Super-wiki has been a delight to work on when it comes to the multiple-authorship model, to be honest. Over the past 4 years of its life, I can recall only a small handful of instances when we had to intervene as a result of a significant contradiction to the wiki's model—and in these cases, it was more users getting the absolute wrong end of the stick with regards to what the wiki is for and how it works. It was just a matter of approaching them personally and trying to assist them in working alongside everyone else, if they wished to.
[2.4] Its growth in terms of policy has been very organic and reactive—we only really write and publicize policy if an issue comes up that requires some form of policing or administrative ruling. But as I said, there's been very little need for this. I think in part this is to do with the content of the wiki—when it comes to canon, it's really just a matter of everyone putting their heads together and sharing all the details they remember, and with the fandom aspect it's not much different—as with canon, if you have more minutiae or info about a fannish article, it's just integrated with what's on the existing page. There's really not much opportunity for there to be conflicting viewpoints in all of that.
[2.5] I suppose on a different model there might be more likelihood of conflict, but the other thing that I think makes the Super-wiki so low on conflict is the example set by the admins (for lack of a more delicate way of putting it). The admin team definitely has its own internalized MO of inclusion and completism—our goal is not to assert our own personal points of view, promote a piece of fandom or canon over another, or be arbiters of taste or opinion. Our main goal is to document as exhaustively as possible. This is reflected in the language we use when writing articles and assisting other users, and the wiki model, with its endless internal linking, helps to connect all the elements together in a very inclusive way, rather than fostering some monolithic concept of fandom/canon/ideas.
[2.6] It makes it easy to keep everyone happy, as does participating in a project whose primary goal is to gain every grain of glee from every tiny, hidden corner of fandom and canon. I get the impression that people don't participate in order to provide contradiction to or aggressively assert individuality to what they read on the wiki, but to be a part of this bigger collective consciousness of fandom that has sprung up in the form of the wiki.
[2.7] DK: How much of the work maintaining the wiki during the regular season comes from the site administrators, and how much comes from your user base?
[2.8] Jules: The mod team works to maintain the core of the wiki and to systemically undertake tasks like keeping certain pages up to date and checking for accuracy, while the editors will edit and enhance entries. For example, a mod will put up the basics of the episode entry each week in the season—production information and so on—but the general editors will provide the bulk of information on the page. Some editors have undertaken to maintain certain entries—like the ratings page, or the appearances of the deer's head in episodes (hey, that's important!). Periodically a call will be put out for particular projects that need attention, such as completing transcripts. Our general users are essential in adding to the depth and diversity of information on the wiki, and they are particularly assiduous in proofreading and fixing my typos.
3. A collaborative Internet
[3.1] DK: There are a number of wikis dedicated to Supernatural. Do you have relationships with the creators of any of the others? How do you encourage people to contribute to yours, and how do you encourage high-quality or high-volume contributions? Do you encourage cross-linking with the other Supernatural wikis or with Wikipedia?
[3.2] Hope: When we first set up the wiki, season 1 of Supernatural was still airing, so the volume of Supernatural fan sites was considerably less than it is now. Still, we didn't really do much research into alternate sites before establishing the Super-wiki. I think part of that was because I, at least, felt it was filling a gap I perceived in the SPN community I was a part of (fic writers on LiveJournal [LJ]). Already fen in that community were gathering minutiae and seeking out more. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity to make a central place for them/us to continue to do so with ease.
[3.3] I believe that set up our ongoing mode of engagement—I think its success in establishment relied at least a little on Lea and me being familiar to the community. We were voices and sources that people trusted—enough to follow our links, see what we were doing, even invest their own knowledge in our project. The personal, one-on-one aspect of that continued as the wiki grew. We gained attention not so much by promoting ourselves randomly but by continuing to fill gaps; if someone was asking a question about canon, we'd point them to the answer on the wiki. If someone made an awesome, impacting fan work, we'd invite them to create an article for it on the wiki.
[3.4] We have discussed ways of drawing in fen from the broader SPN communities through more strategic promotion, but frankly, most of the team's energy is spent on the wiki, adding information and helping users there. There's not a lot left for concentrated outreach. With regards to cross-linking—we encourage linking to any relevant resources, and we get many hits from Wikipedia, though we must follow their strict linking policy (I believe it wasn't even the admin team who had a link to us approved on Wikipedia!).
[3.5] The issue of translating the wiki has been brought to us a few times, and while we've been leaning toward putting a GNU or Creative Commons license on the wiki to allow non-English-speaking fans to create their own projects using the information we've gathered, again, the constant demand for administrating the wiki has prevented us from moving in new directions.
[3.6] Jules: Relationships are very important in fandom, and the Super-wiki has worked hard to earn a reputation as a good fandom citizen. We always acknowledge the source of material or links, whether from individual fans or other Web sites. We are there to document other sites and to link to them when they have content of interest, without favoring one over another. It's a reciprocal relationship, and I think as a result of the unique nature of the Super-wiki, there is no other site doing what we do, which means that we aren't seen as competition for the audience of other sites, but rather complementary.
4. Rules
[4.1] DK: What are your guidelines for permissible content?
[4.2] Jules: Ha ha. This is the fandom where canon includes slaughtered nuns, baby eating, and psychopathic clowns, and where real person slash battles with gay incest and angel porn for the high moral ground. So possibly we have broader definitions of what is acceptable than most! We have clear and quite strict policies regarding copyrighted material plagiarism. It's generally about educating editors—for example, we link to original material rather than copying and pasting it; and we provide clear citations and attributions.
[4.3] Hope: We do limit material for copyright reasons, sticking with a fair use policy when it comes to quoting text directly from tie-in material or storing images on the site. It's sometimes a frustrating balance to strike—on the one hand, we want to be completists and include all the promo images released for each episode; on the other, that risks violating fair use. So we try to link to people who don't have such concerns to try to get that completism fulfilled. (That concern is less of an ideological issue and more that we don't want to risk losing the massive body of work the wiki has become.)
[4.4] Legal issues aside, our content guidelines have always been less about what's "permissible" (along with what Jules said above about the questionable nature of canon, we're all for a warts-and-all documentation of fandom as well, and so we are anticensorship on that front), and more about scope. Earlier on, the admin team had big planning sessions on just how far we wanted the wiki to go (and of course, how to organize it all). We've had to find a balance between what is useful and what is available elsewhere. Our Library section is mainly where this is an issue—while users might find it useful to find all there is to know about vampire lore in the one place on our wiki, we see it as counterproductive to rewrite (or copy and paste) info that can be found more easily on Wikipedia (especially when their users are going to provide more exhaustive info on that score than ours). So primarily we want to archive what canon says about vampires, and make it clear that that's what our MO is, but still provide users with links to where they can get further—not seen in canon, even—info about the topic elsewhere.
[4.5] So as far as unsubstantiated research goes—the vast majority of stuff on the wiki should be from canon itself, and therefore cited pretty directly and able to be backed up by several thousand other people who've seen, heard, or read exactly the same thing. It's all part of the nerdy completism that characterizes the wiki that everything is cited down to a T, really.
[4.6] As a sort of tangent (and sort of related to the "edit wars" question), I do recall one or two instances early on in the wiki's life where an editor felt the urge to delete content from some of the fandom pages (namely, a couple of slash pages). Although the user didn't respond to our communication, I got the impression that she assumed our model was more similar to Wikipedia than it was; with the inclusion of fandom material, it automatically resembles Fanlore's PPOV [plural point of view] rather than Wikipedia's NPOV [neutral point of view] (note 1).
[4.7] DK: What's your spoiler policy? Do you have an international user base, and if so, has this affected your spoiler policy's development?
[4.8] Jules: The Super-wiki is totally spoiler free until an episode airs. That includes all show-related material—casting spoilers, promotional pictures, and episode titles. We do, however, provide links to spoiler material on other sites. For example, we provided casting information for episode 5.01 "Sympathy for the Devil." We also warn for spoilers in material we link to, such as interviews or articles about the show. The majority of the mod team is not based in the United States, but these days, through the wonders of the Internet, viewing of the show around the world is possible within hours of its airing in the States. We try to have at least the major components of an episode entry completed by the day after the episode airs
[4.9] Hope: The spoiler ban only extends as long as the first airing of the episode because that's often the most active period of content contribution—right after an episode airs, when viewers are still excited, and details are fresh in their minds! It is worth making clear, though, that our spoiler policy is splashed all over our wiki not only to stop people posting spoilery info before the episode airs, but also to allow spoilerphobes to avoid the wiki until they've seen the episode. It's less about us declaring what we think the length of a spoiler period is, and more about making sure spoilerphobes aren't caught out by us. Fen in Australia know that as soon as it's aired in United States, the wiki will contain spoilers; therefore, they can avoid it if they wish.
5. Fandom
[5.1] DK: How do you approach fandom wars, both in character or canon interpretation, and the personal vendettas that arise in a fandom?
[5.2] Jules: Supernatural must be a very peaceful and harmonious fandom, because we have no issues like this either in the canon or fandom pages. The most heated arguments that ever occur are over issues such as the spelling of character names. Who could forget the Henrickson/Hendricksen/Henriksen contretemps of 2007?
[5.3] Seriously, the highlight of the wiki has been how its embodied those tenets of fandom: creativity, collaboration, and community. It not only documents fandom's creativity, it is a creative space. Your contributions might be proofreading, translating Latin exorcisms, or adding The Simpsons allusions to an episode entry. One editor said to me, "I love that it's somewhere I can feel my contributions really make a difference." Collaboration occurs from the admin team, whose members live on three continents, and every time someone edits the wiki. And it has developed an important role in providing a link, a sense of community, between the parts of fandom that are flung far across Web 2.0.
[5.4] Hope: With regards to fandom wars, we see it as more our responsibility to document the differing opinions (and their battle strategies!) rather than to serve as a site for conflict to occur. I think the software, and the independence of the site from existing fandom service providers, helps us maintain this position—it's very clear just what the wiki is (and isn't) for.
[5.5] One of the facets of this independence is that the sharing of information here isn't influenced by the same expectations of fannish etiquette particular to other multiauthor models, such as an LJ community. I think this is one of the reasons we don't suffer from the same sorts of conflicts among community members that crop up frequently in spaces like LJ. Nor do we experience the sort of conflict other fannish wikis go through.
[5.6] I think part of the harmonious nature of the Super-wiki is due to the fan work-producing community we sprang out of. With most other fannish wikis (if not all; I haven't done extensive research, but I hope that I would have heard otherwise if that were the case), the scope is very specific to the canon of the original text. The furthest the wiki contributors venture away from canon material might be to provide canon analysis, theories, or predictions. In the cases of some fannish wikis (such as Lostpedia [http://lostpedia.wikia.com/], as written about in the last issue of TWC!), conflict has arisen when content that strays into fanon was shut down.
[5.7] In contrast, we see what goes on in the Supernatural fandom, and the fanon (and fan works) Supernatural fans have developed, as just as important to archive and document as the canon. We make sure to distinguish what material on the wiki came from official sources, but this isn't to discount what comes from fans. Rather, it's to place proud distinction on what the fandom produces!
[5.8] It's been said that the Super-wiki straddles the SPN fandom and canon because the canon component exists to serve the fandom—and in a way, this is true. I know that part of the reason I set up the site in the first place was to provide a useful resource to people playing in the Supernatural universe, checking out the canon and choosing to take it or leave it as they wish. But that's not the extent of it; I think that this collation and documentation is, in a way, just as much a fan work as a piece of fan fiction or fan vid or fan art (or plushy Metallicar, or filk!). In straddling the content scope between canon and fanon, I think we're also muddying what's often seen as quite distinct waters between the types of fan communities that produce Lostpedia, and the types of fan communities that write Wincest. I think we're demonstrating in practice that both sorts of fannish engagement are not only worthwhile but equal—and certainly not mutually exclusive! We've demonstrated pretty clearly that fans can be obsessed with the minutiae of canon as well as the construction of fanon/fandom. In doing this so successfully, and becoming more widely known, I like to hope that we've also succeeded in one of the things that was really important to Lea and me when we were deciding on this canon/fandom scope early on—demonstrating through example that the texts and practices of fandom are just as valid and important as the canon, in the big-picture experience of Supernatural.
[5.9] DK: You note that fandom and its artworks are just as important to archive and document as canon. The wiki itself, though, has remarkably little about specific fan works or fanon, and most of what is there is packed into the (amazingly well organized) Fandom Chronicles. Have any users wanted to add more comprehensive details about specific fan works or fan creators?
[5.10] Jules: The Super-wiki documents fandom and fanon in a number of ways. First, it documents where this large and disperse fandom lives, with entries on and links to many of the fan sites, message boards, and blogs such as Supernatural.tv (http://www.supernatural.tv/), Winchester Bros. (http://www.winchesterbros.com/), and the CW Lounge (http://www.cwtv.com/thecw/cwlounge). We also link to the Supernatural Yellow Pages (http://delicious.com/spnyellowpages), a fan project on Delicious that links to over 500 Supernatural fan sites, including ones in languages other than English.
[5.11] There are a number of detailed entries and recaps on Television Without Pity (http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/), and of course LiveJournal, where much of the creative works reside. Fandom events of note on LJ are documented in the Fandom Chronicles (http://supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Fandom_Chronicles), and there is a directory of Supernatural communities on LJ (http://supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Livejournal_Communities), as well as a page (http://supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Fandom_Wank) that describes the events that have prompted entries on Fandom Wank (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/).
[5.12] The Fan Projects category at the Super-wiki covers major fan efforts from zines and anthologies, to promotional campaigns for the show and charity fund-raisers. It also covers fan projects that support the infrastructure of fandom, such as the Supernatural newsletter (LJ community spnnewsletter) and rec communities on LJ.
[5.13] The Fan Works category covers the major creative efforts of fandom—fic, vids, art, meta, and music and audio productions. The Fan Fic section documents its history in Supernatural, including the origins and early influences in the major genres of Wincest and RPF [real person fiction], and when certain pairings appeared in relation to canon. There are explanations and examples of subgenres such as crack, alternate universe, kink, and crossovers, and links to the major fiction challenges. We document the amazing Fic Link Archive, which categorizes and links to all fic listed in the Supernatural newsletter—over 30,000 entries! This great project also has an analysis of the proportional representation of different genres. The wiki also provides an overview of the history of art and vids in this fandom, and links to the various archives and fan sites related to these. The meta entries links to both collections and individual essays.
[5.14] Individual fan works are documented where they form a significant body of work—for example, the Plastic Winchester Theatre, the Episode Reviews of Doom, and the Encyclopedia of Weirdness.
[5.15] Other fan efforts are embedded in the canon documentation. For example, the entry on the original music score for the show includes a fan analysis of its themes and motifs. Dudemeter and Laundry List are also testaments to colossal fan effort expended to record and analyze the details of the show.
[5.16] The Vernacular category captures terms and phrases unique to Supernatural fandom, such as the coining of the term Metallicar on the Television Without Pity boards, through its spread in fandom, to its use by both the show itself and commercial merchandising; or the history of the term Wincest from the first time it was used in fic, to the appearance of Wincest fic on the show itself.
[5.17] Finally, the pages that list fan conventions have acted both as documentation and meeting place. Fans come here to share their reports, pictures, and vids about fan conventions. The top five pages alone have over half a million hits. The Super-wiki was also responsible for starting the use of con-related hash tags on Twitter. Many other media sites refer to the Super-wiki convention entries as the major source of information on professional conventions. In addition, the wiki documents the history of fan-focused conventions such as Winchestercon.
[5.18] Lea: Personally, this question seems to me a misinterpretation of the terms fan works and fanon. Fanon, as a term, is especially interesting: it derives from the word canon, which describes everything that has been established by the official text (of a show, of a book, of a movie, and so on). Fanon, on the other hand, is something not officially confirmed, but rather implied by the official text and then picked up by fans. Something doesn't become fanon just because one or two fans perceive something from the original text. It only becomes fanon when it is generally acknowledged by the collective of the fans making up fandom. Fanon is at the same time "true" and "untrue," as it is perceived as such by a large number of individuals, but fluid and constantly in movement because it can change in time with other observations. Thus, fanon is collective knowledge, and fandom is like a collective mind—a beehive, so to speak. There's just no queen bee, even though certain BNFs [big-name fans] like to believe they are.
[5.19] I'd like to stay with that notion of fandom as a collective. To me, fan works is likewise a term used for texts, video, and other items produced by fans that are based on what an individual or a group of fans perceive to be influenced by the original text of the show, or by an occurrence or trend in fandom. Henry Jenkins calls the process of their creation textual poaching (in that sense, fanon is textual poaching, too, by the way). So what we do on the wiki is document certain aspects of this poaching by trying to fit these things into certain categories so they can be looked at as a general tendency or as an occurrence. It's a very scientific approach, actually. We don't want to document fans by putting up essays or pages for each individual. Instead, we look for certain types of fans, certain fan products, and fandom as a collective.
[5.20] Hope: This is an interesting question. I think the way it's been phrased illuminates the bit of fandom you're coming from, Deb, and our reaction to it has made me realize the position we feel we occupy—though I think that among the admin team, we have different experiences of this! Here are my theories on it.
[5.21] Though we (the admin team) as individuals originate in media fandom—the communities that the Organization for Transformative Works (http://transformativeworks.org/) sprouted from, and subsequently the modes of engagement and degrees of importance that are writ upon the Fanlore wiki—the Super-wiki doesn't really operate within the same place, or with the same degree of insularity. Personally, I think this is for a couple of reasons—as mentioned before, our distance from the locale of LJ, and the connections we've made through other services (Twitter, fan message boards—as discussed by Jules). This results in us taking the wider view of fan activity: we document things that have a higher profile, whose significance extends above the self-contained media fandom on LJ, and we also document things of similar notoriety that popped out of other SPN fan communities.
[5.22] This perspective reflects the scale of SPN fan communities slightly more accurately than a focus on the minutiae of a specific fan community would. I think it also invites more contribution from a wider scope of SPN fans in recording their activities, because that's part of it too. The tone of the wiki does lean more toward documentation than analysis; I think talking about individual fan works would be more analysis. The documentation is evident throughout the wiki in the fandom categories.
[5.23] In addition—and this is something I say upon reflection; it was certainly not explicitly planned on—the fact that we don't go so deep into media fandom as to have pages about the activities of individual fans or their individual stories protects the insularity of those media fandom spaces, which already have a blurred public/private boundary. We're very aware of the high profile of the wiki and of the broadness of its audience, and we know that TPTB [The Powers That Be] are aware of it (and some visit it). I think that skimming the surface of media fandom—by documenting its topography rather than showing it in its knickers (to dramatically mix metaphors)—allows us to both showcase the bits of it we're happy for the wider audience to see, admire, and engage with, and to maintain the degree of privacy that exists in our other fannish spaces. And of course, as I recall, this privacy was Lea's and my MO when we first conceptualized fannish material on the wiki. It provides visitors with both reassurance that the fannish activities we're introducing are fun and wonderful, as well as with the tools for leaping into it if they want more. We provide links that will take users to other sites where their engagement with other fen or with fan works are already established within the terms of the community.
[5.24] But to directly answer your question about users inserting information about fans and fan works. Has anyone ever tried to add that kind of material? Not that I'm aware of. I think the model of this wiki and its existing content do not necessarily suggest this kind of entry, and that is something reasonably consistent across fandom wikis in general. The Fanlore wiki, on the other hand, is doing something new in these terms—something that doesn't necessarily automatically occur to contributors, even where there's already fannish content.
6. Technical details
[6.1] DK: How did you choose your software? How do technical considerations affect the administrative experience, editor experience, and reader experience?
[6.2] Hope: The MediaWiki software was chosen out of convenience and availability. My Web host offers some automated sys admin [system administrator] support for MediaWiki, and because neither Lea nor I are sys admins by trade, it was the easiest option! It also helped that MediaWiki is what Wikipedia runs on, which means that visitors are likely to have some visual familiarity with how the site works—the same going for editors too. Of course, it also runs the risk of being conflated with Wikipedia, but I don't think we've had that sort of issue for a while.
[6.3] So far, we've had a reasonably good run of it with our technical considerations. While I'm not a sys admin, I do work in the IT industry, which means I do feel generally capable of administrating the wiki. One of the other benefits of using MediaWiki is that because it has such high-profile use (in Wikipedia), as a piece of FOSS [free and open source software], it's quite well supported—in terms of things like security upgrades to the software, or developers creating useful plug-ins and extensions to enhance it. This has certainly enhanced the reader experience—it's helped us provide things like a Google Maps extension and more page-ranking details.
[6.4] This kind of enhancement has been gradual, though—mainly because the software was new to us as administrators when we started. As the technical administrator of the site, I have to say I've learned massive amounts about the software just through using it (and have since worked more with MediaWiki professionally, growing that knowledge exponentially!).
[6.5] DK: If you could change one thing you did at the beginning of the wiki's construction, what would it be?
[6.6] Hope: Right now I'm really happy with the way the wiki's data are organized. A couple of years ago, we had a big overhaul of the site structure that involved a lot of recategorization. This was mainly because Lea and I were experimenting in the early stages. But since then, after working more on the Super-wiki and other wikis, we realized there was a better way to do it. All that recategorization was a lot of work; it would have been nice to decide to do it that way the first time around. But on the other hand, all the discussions we had about scope and so forth during that period were invaluable, and we couldn't have had those conversations if there wasn't an existing model (and stack of content) to look at.
[6.7] DK: What kind of recategorization did you do?
[6.8] Hope: Mainly we just looked at all the articles we had and figured out how to better arrange them, especially in light of the growing focus on the production/celebrity side of Supernatural, and in light of the growth of tie-in material. We sat down and made decisions about how far we should go in documenting official material versus relevant material. We looked at how both content and the text itself had grown, and we created a site map that was both flexible enough to expand as the whole shebang grew, and restrictive enough to not just be a big soup of information.
7. Note
1. Fanlore (http://fanlore.org/) is a multiauthored reference based on wiki software that tracks the history and current state of fan communities and activities. Its plural point of view policy states that each author's contribution is valid and valuable. Fanlore is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, which also sponsors Transformative Works and Cultures.